Animal House: 1978 recalling the 'Sixties: 1968 - through the early 1970s. The United States was insisting on conducting war without regard for law or decency or morality or ethics or political support from home not hijacked by Nazis. The setting was a college: not a "good" college (high class educational fraud); a totally fraudulent C-tier college. The (anti)heroes are the animals of the title. (Or are they? Everyone connected with the culture the film depicts/imagines were disgusting hypocritical animals: in point, Dean Wormer, Mayor "Carmine," the other frats and sororities posed as superior to the blatantly venal, degenerate Delta house. Hell, instead of explaining why Milton was assigned, the lit prof insults Milton and hides behind authority!) (In my Free Learning Exchange, 1970, you could study Milton or not study Milton. It was up to you, to your parents, to your ambition, your talents: there was no curriculum!)
The king is bad, so is the pope, so are the barons, so are the peasants. Sodom and Gomorrah. Dead-on American satire: disgusting and proud of it. It's well cast (but not nearly as well made as it could have/should have been). I just want to recall it to introduce my real topic: the concept of In absentia. Dean Wormer has it out for the Deltas. (A civilized society would have had it out for Dear Wormer long before it bothered turning on the scum of Delta House.) (Picking on Delta House is like squashing rat turds instead of capturing the rat.)
Faber College fulfills multiple roles in the society: it keeps semi-privileged young adults out of the job market, it separates future management candidates from present turn-the-bolt robots, it ripens (while degenerating) future dropout cannon fodder ... Once upon a time colleges developed to keep young nobles out of the hair of the reigning nobles: simultaneously the colleges trained a few talented peasants to read, write, take dictation, convey messages, maybe even give advice: Thomas Becket getting prepped by and for Henry II, Chaucer being trained for Richard II ... John Jay learning law for the young US.
Any college can do that: the ones that are relied on to do it are Harvard, Yale ... John Jay's Columbia. "Faber" College has no such role. Faber College is kin to WalMart's Sam's Cola imitating Pepsi's imitation of Coke: somebody gets rich selling mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, somebody else can right away sell some imitation mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, then somebody else can manufacture a really cheap mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz and sell it to the public. Thus: Cambridge, Harvard, Faber.
Is intelligence involved anywhere? Sure. Intelligence isn't entirely absent from anything humans do; but don't expect much intelligence, don't expect quality intelligence. Do expect cut corners. Expect hypocrisy, fraud. You look for God, you get the Church.
Anyhow: Dean Wormer has it in for Delta House. He shows that he has Nazi powers, that he's the CIA as well as the White House / Congress. Dean Wormer is also the Court. He reads some charges to some proxy Deltas. A Delta rep begins to respond. "That's enough of that!" says Little Hitler.
In Paths of Glory French officers intend to "make an example of" a few soldiers. They chose three soldiers by lot, then they charge them with cowardice, then they execute them. The condemned are given legal representation, imprisoned, and shot. Why the legal representation? Why not just shoot them?
Same reason I was given legal representation after the FBI arrested me. Same reason the son of Allah eats with his right hand and pisses with his left, same reason the Jew avoids pork. Empty ritual: while thieves and frauds maraud the earth: destroying the possibility of our kind of life, bringing our species to a much-deserved, long-overdue end.
America wanted to bomb whoever it wanted to bomb. In the words of Hollywood's Stone's Richard Nixon: "I'm the President of the United States: I can bomb whoever I want!"
Harvard / MIT was important to such a goal, but so was Faber College. Full fraud needs Coke and Pepsi and Sam's Choice: and a huge helpless narcotized public with teeth as rotten as their awareness. Harvard, Faber, and Hollywood. And the Times. And don't forget TV!
The idea behind judgments in absentia is that "everyone" is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial. A fair trial in civilization is a replacement for the defeated General Custer putting the victorious Crazy Horse in jail. The US has to pretend to give Crazy Horse a trial, it has to pretend that the trial is "fair." It has rituals one has to attend law school for a decade to learn to pretend that facts or truth or reason has something to do with Manifest Destiny, with reelecting "the President." And those rituals are best carried out if the "coward" to be convicted is drugged during the trial. But it's then important to wake him up for his execution. Paths of Glory is elaborate in showing the care with which the unconscious soldier is revived so he'll be conscious at his own murder.
I suggest that kleptocracies conduct most of their rituals with the possibility of truth or reason held in absentia. Christians will be most brilliant in refuting Jews if no Jews are present: or, if those Jews present have first been castrated, lobotomized, sanitized.
It happened to me all my life, since childhood, long before the US court convicted me without having read the thousands of essays of mine that they censored, without having understand a thing I said: to my attorney, or all my life. My attorney strongly advised me not to speak at the trial except to answer direct questions from the judge, and then to answer, Yes / No: or they'd rig a trial that would convict me for forty years. How much writing would I be able to do when I was 108? How at 108 could I overcome the gap of Knatz.com having been silenced from 2006 to 2046?
Of course it didn't really matter: I already knew, not three people out of four billion had understood what I was saying: and those that did pretended not to.
Boy, has Knatz.com been refuted over the years: but always with Knatz in absentia.
2011 01 11 There's a marvelous line in Animal House that I didn't work in yesterday. The Delta turds con some girls from a sorority at a college other than Faber to go out with them. At their own Delta toga party they'd contracted Otis Day and the Knights: they spot a marquee advertising that group, but the bar proves to be a "black" bar: our college kids are stuck as an unwelcome minority. Trying to fit in, to look harmless, to make conversation, one Delta schmuck asks a threatening local, "Where do you guys go to school?" !
The blacks are not college kids. They are not the privileged. They are the bolt turners, the canon fodder. They are not being held apart from the job market, the delay sure to be made up to them later via compensatory privileges.
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